A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a client computer or client software in client-server architecture networks which depends primarily on a central server for processing activities, and mainly focuses on conveying input and output between the user and the remote server. In contrast, a thick or fat client does as much processing as possible and passes only data for communications and storage to the server.
Terminal server hardware and software solutions allow one or more enterprise users to share computing and application resources running on a ‘terminal server’ which sits between the client workstation and back-end servers and applications. One of the primary benefits of terminal service solutions is the ability to share, and as such, make more efficient use of computational resources. Unfortunately, sharing of the network resources which provide access to back-end resources within a terminal server obscures the identity of the original user with regard to network traffic between the terminal server(s) and the back-end resources. The effect is that the network traffic generated by several client workstations are aggregated together into a single (or sometimes multiple) network data stream running between the terminal server(s) and the back-end resources. Accordingly, a need exists in the art for an improved solution for associating network traffic to enterprise users.